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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined South Florida’s First News with Jimmy Celafo to discuss new laws restricting TikTok’s operation in the U.S. and the impending end of Title 42. See below for highlights.
On new laws restricting TikTok’s operation in the U.S.:
“It’s not just the government [that has banned TikTok on its devices]. The military has already done this. They don’t allow you to have the app on a government device. Many states are now doing it. The people that know about this stuff will not allow it on their systems. There’s a reason, and the [reason is that] Bytedance, which is the parent company of TikTok, is a Chinese company.
“There is no such thing as an independent Chinese company. Every single one of them has to do whatever the government of China tells them. There is growing evidence in the public record, including leaked audio of executives at TikTok…, and employees that have left TikTok [who have] testified to this, that TikTok turns over data, massive troves of personal data on millions of Americans, to the Chinese government. The Chinese government has access to all the information on the devices that download TikTok.
“Someone will say, ‘Who cares if the Chinese government knows about what some 16-year-old teenager is doing?’ [That is] not really the issue. The issue is [the collection of data from] millions and millions and millions of 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 30-year-olds, all of that data combined…. It’s not an individual liability. It’s a collective liability.
“Suddenly the Chinese can know more about our country than we know about ourselves. Now they can create algorithms to feed us news that distorts the truth, that’s pro-Chinese, that causes us to hate each other and fight with each other. They tried to get people not to vote in the [midterm] election. They were deliberately using the [TikTok] algorithm to put out messages, created by the Chinese government, telling us not to vote, in a nonpartisan way. And that’s not to mention that they’re going to have your contacts, your emails, your texting, all of this information.
“I have some people come to me and say, ‘Don’t Facebook and Twitter and all these other companies in America also collect personal data?’ Absolutely they do, and I’m concerned about that. It’s not a good thing…. But they don’t turn it over to a foreign government that happens to be a communist regime in Beijing that wants to overtake the United States and is already trying to divide us and hurt us.”
On the impending end of Title 42:
“In the annals of American public policy, there’s never been a crisis as big as what’s happening at the border that’s received such little attention. Most of the mainstream media outlets are not covering it on a regular basis. It’s thousands of people [crossing the border] a day. And some of [the mainstream media outlets] are actually saying that it’s not a big deal.
“People know [the end of Title 42] will increase exponentially the number of people coming [to the border]. Florida’s going to experience some of this, too. It may not be directly related to Title 42, from a legal perspective. But [the end of Title 42 will affect] the perception of the people that are coming. You’re going to see an increase in the rafters that we’ve seen from Cuba and Haiti. In the early part of next year, we could very well see a very significant migratory crisis from rafters in Florida.”